Make no plans

Ok, I’m back, for how long? Who knows! My new motto is: make no plans, cause you won’t follow through with them anyway. I’ll spare everyone the tedious updates of the past few months, suffice it to say that we’re all fine, The Husband is still home and hasn’t had to go back in to the hospital. The kids and I all went through varying degrees of summer illnesses, from “not too sick, just a minor temperature for a couple of days” – The Girl, still haven’t figured out if actually sick or just teething, to “very high fever for three days, incredibly inflamed tonsils and 10 days of antibiotics” – The Boy, to “OMG, I’m going to die, or spontaneously combust, am totally delirious, can’t eat, drink or swallow my saliva, yet somehow I still need to take care of the kids” -  that would be me, the heroine.

Now that we appear to have regained our health, I let my masochistic streak have its way and so have started “sleep training” the kids. Oh the fun we’re having! The Boy, who used to be a great sleeper (we went through the sleep training bit with him as a baby) regressed after The Girl’s birth and The Husband’s hospital stay and so wouldn’t go to sleep alone, and the poor Girl had no sleep patterns whatsoever cause she was always handed off from person to person or had a boob stuck in her mouth to shut her up (my parenting skills the past few months have been exemplary….). Anyway, we decided to right all these wrongs…. I’ll spare you the details, but The Boy now sleeps on his own, after 10 minutes story time in my lap, as long as the door is kept open (fine, I’m reasonable, we compromised), also I can shut it once he’s asleep so we don’t have to keep tip toeing around. It still takes The Girl a few minutes of crying to get to sleep, but the hysterics are getting better and better AND she’s sleeping through the night to 6ish at which time she nurses and generally goes back to sleep for an hour or so in my bed. So DEFINITE IMPROVEMENT all around. I, of course, still wake up 80 times a night to go check on them but am hopeful that I will stop being so neurotic soon, so I can finally enjoy my first full nights of sleep in over 2 years (The Boy always slept great, but also woke up for a night feed till he was one and a half, at which point he started sleeping till 8.30 am but I was pregnant enough with The Girl to wake up every three hours to pee.)

Lately I’ve been filling the little inflatable kiddy pool for The Boy in the afternoon in an effort to fight this insane heat wave we’ve been going through and I had the chance to make a few reflections. First of all, I’m amazed at how hysterically giddy The Boy gets every single time he sees me taking it out of the garage to fill it up with water, he literally gets this manic laugh and starts running circles around me going: “pool, hahahahaha, pool hahahaha, pool hahahaha” with a slight question inflection at the end of pool, like he can’t quite believe that I’m filling it so he can go swimming, and I wonder, what does he think I’m going to do, fill it up and not let him get in? I mean, I’ve NEVER been that mean to him….

Also, I’m constantly amazed at how much completely unprompted, fun games he’ll make up as long as he’s got some water and some sort of container to scoop it up. This of course is true of dirt as well, one day he spent 4 hours playing in the dirt under our pomegranate tree with a shovel, a rake and a tractor.

I so wish there was something to absorb my interest that way, something that I could do, that would be so fun, so inexpensive, that would just make time fly….

I tell you, I’m often jealous of him, of his crazy energy, his unadulterated joy, his unmitigated excitement, as well as the depth of his tragedy when I take him away from his toys for a bath, or bed or food… the ups and downs of being two are just amazing!